Interesting article about faculty and social media, touching a tiny bit on online presence & digital identity ( because you know — say it with me kids — if you’re not building your digital identity, someone is building it for you…)

but also further removes the illusion that faculty members — or anyone, for that matter — can maintain a completely private life on the Internet.

Heh. Did we think otherwise? Come to think about it, is any part of our life private? Our financial transactions and life are stored online, webcams almost EVERYWHERE, so what IS private?

Faculty may make efforts to preserve their private lives, but professors really have “24-7” jobs and can never fully distance themselves from their identities as educators held to high standards, said Brad Ward, who advises colleges on using social media.

I think that the EXPECTATION that we ALWAYS have to represent our institution or company is outdated and doesn’t fit very well with social media. If you expect to participate in social media, there has to be understanding that people will be… well… people. Otherwise, it just into yet another digital platform for pr and publishing.

Heads up… more changes for Facebook.I’ve gotten 3 notices in the last 3 days about moving applications to tabs. Profile boxes are going away. I have my Pandora playlist embedded in what I thought was a box, but FB calls it an information area, so maybe that one is okay.

It does appear that you can still move them to a Boxes tab to put them all in one spot, but they will no longer be directly embedded on your profile page.

Kind of sucks, doesn’t it?To see what you’ve put in a box:Go to Account> Application Settings>Added to Profile

Also, for those of you who play games at FB (farmville, mafia wars, etc. — you know who you are), if you want notifications, you will need to go through an email address. You can add a new email address to FB to give you more choices or you can choose FB random email.To change to a new email to your facebook account:Go to Account>Account Settings>Settings>Click change next to emailI’m not quite sure what that is yet (the new FB email that has been talked about on the ‘net? or just that I’ll get notifications but they will come in through email somehow???)

So, this was MY question today: as in, I wanted to re-post a tweet about moonshine arts & literary magazine. I couldn’t quite remember what I wrote and I didn’t use a #hashtag. So what to do? How do you search your own twitter feed? There are lots of cool trending tools out there, but those are very limited in terms of timeframe. I personally like trendtastic.

Per my usual M.O. I tweeted, buzzed, & facebook’d my request –even before I google’d, now what does that tell ya? I tell you what it tells me — I trust my networks of techies, artists, photographers, librarians, metadata mavens, programmers, hackers, writers, proj managers DIVAS — the creme de cool , more than google for quick answers.

Here is what I tried BEFORE I tweeted my plea for help:

Searching via twitter by keywords I thought I used

Searching google via advanced search: using key words and limiting to domain twitter.com and by date

None of these achieved any results. Strange, no? Not even the advanced search feature was successful. I know that I can scroll back chronologically through my posts but that is a LOT of work.

Doesn’t this seem like a huge failure on twitter’s part? Surely there are times when people what to see something from a previous week or month…and how will that fit into the semantic web? If the semantic web is all about the data and finding relevant info, whoa… huge hole.

One answerMy friend and webgurl, Amy, tweeted back almost instantly:

set up an RSS feed for own tweets & search in Thunderbird.

Looking at it from the RSS angle, I pulled my twitter feed into google reader, but that pretty pretty much starts with today, so didn’t help me find my moonshine arts tweet. I did find it using advanced search using friendfeed (yeah, I have an account there, too!), so big kudos to them. Good luck if you ever want to find anything in twitter or facebook. It’s nearly impossible — perhaps, this is where google buzz will score its biggest hit.…and if I’m wrong and there is an easier way to do this, by ALL means, please let me know — because I’m not the only one who wants to see what they have tweeted.

I surely hope this is the last fb update for a little while. Everytime I teach a class on fb, everything changes! LOL

So, many of us (including myself and probably 85% of my friends who post images to fb) have been having problems with the uploader, especially with firefox (firefox, you used to be so dependable, but that is another post….) We’ve updated java, done all of the other magic tricks, but no luck. Of course, alot of us have had all sorts of issues with fb (nothing like a new version rolling out to cause breaks in current functionality…). Btw, more here about the new version of fb…

Anyhow, fb has been aware of the uploader problems, and has created a new uploader developed in house. More here. Lots of chatter on the net about this (just google it.. lol)

Important to know for Firefox users:

Facebook has started rolling out the new uploader and it should be coming to everyone within a few weeks. When you want to upload a photo, you’ll be asked if you want to install the photo uploader plugin. Facebook says that this shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes. What it doesn’t say is that the plugin is only available for Firefox, 3.5 mind you, not the latest 3.6 as Facebook says it has disabled it in 3.6 due to a security vulnerability, for Google Chrome but only on Windows and very recently it has been made available for Internet Explorer 7 and above.

This is from an article at allfacebook, but lots of chatter (Techcrunch, lots o’ blogs) all over the ‘net about facebook’s new (or perhaps, just improved) if it’s scaled off of the current private messaging (PM) feature…

According to Mike Arrington, Facebook is preparing to roll out its own email client, code named “Titan”. We’ve suggested to Facebook in the past that they roll out an email client as they have an opportunity to redefine the product. Additionally, Paul Bucheit, the lead developer of Gmail, is now an employee of Facebook which means he may have another opportunity to redefine the email experience.

Just in case you weren’t one of the 800000 to be surprised with a new version of facebook yesterday, you can read all about it at mashable. Also, lots of broke stuff at facebook today: likes missing, PM not working, etc.

Sigh. I wish they would give us a bit of break before they roll out a new change, or perhaps, allow us to opt into the new change, instead of just surprising it on people. My mom already has the new version, but no one else I know does. I know, my mom! LOL Oh, and you can see the demo, here.

I’m beginning to think facebook is throwing anything out they can, to see what might stick. Not really a good business or web design model…